A key Obama administration scientist brushed aside data that showed a slowdown in global warming while preparing a 2015 study report that coincided with the United States’ participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, a whistle blower alleged.

In a major report published in 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that global warming slowed down between 1998 and 2012 as compared with any similar period over the past 3-6 decades. But, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Thomas Karl discredited the notion of a slowdown in global warming in a study published in the journal Science in June 2015.

Whistleblower climate scientist John Bates claimed that NOAA broke rules its own rules designed to ensure scientific integrity while preparing the report.

Bates alleged that Karl and his team debunked the “hiatus” in global warming to “dupe” world leaders into accepting the Paris Climate Agreement that aims to fight back climate change by cutting manmade carbon emissions.

Karl, former director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said at the time, “Our new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.”

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, questioned the timing of the controversial report, noting that it was published just before the Obama Administration submitted its Clean Power Plan to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015.